


Compare/Contrast

by Fascinated



Category: Cowboy Bebop
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-18
Updated: 2013-10-18
Packaged: 2017-12-29 19:39:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1009257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fascinated/pseuds/Fascinated
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They have an understanding: no one talks, no one gets hurt.</p>
<p>(This was written many years ago, but never published.  I'm not sure if I'm going to expand it or not, but it probably needs some polish first.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Things Unsaid

Smooth.  
  
The concrete is smooth beneath her back, cool and faintly gritty.  A contrast to the man above her, pulling his shirt off in the half-moon night. _He_ is all angles and planes, sharp edged inside and out. _He_ can cut you to the quick with a word. A kiss. A well-placed silence.  
  
It's his kiss now that silences her, cutting like always but the pain reminds her that this is _real_. Real like the calloused hands pinning her shoulders down, leaving gravel to be plucked out of skin in the morning. And suddenly she's real, too. Not disconnected and wondering, but breathing, flesh and blood and slick desire.  She tears at his shirt, hears a stitch pop, can almost taste him all the while. Clothes off, jumbled on the floor and forgotten because she returns his clutching embrace (viciousdesperate like the man himself). He tries to be gentle, but he's not a gentle man by nature. And she's brutal in her need, driving small, sharp white teeth into his shoulder to force him into her. He gasps, it hurts, he slips and then she hurts but _yes_. This is what she needed so desperately. Pressure and friction and somewhere in there the faint scent of blood. There will be bruises in the morning from all of this, but that will be tomorrow. Tomorrow and yesterday and today don't exist right now. Only the mad attempt to reach past the bounds of flesh, into each other. Her hips rising up to meet him, long legs wrapped around his waist and he shudders with desperate restraint, trying to figure out...nothing. Nothing to know right now.  There is crying out, but no names. Names will be remembered with the bruises in sunlight tomorrow.  
  
It goes on, cruel and velvet and broken glass ecstasy, until they are both consumed and drowned in this desire.  
  
But always, slowly, they rise to the surface and name each other again. Redefine reality and look at each other.  
  
And know that it will never be enough. So now he leads her back to her bed, gently (just this once) brushes off the embedded gravel and lays her down beneath a warm blanket. He knows she gets cold.  She doesn't know he knows, thinks only that he’s trying to be polite.  (It's better that way.)  A whisper of lips across her forehead and a door closes.  
  
Ten clicking steps down the hallway, 11th click as the TV turns on. She may sleep easily after these....encounters, but he probably never will.  
  
But hey...John Wayne movies always have a happy ending.


	2. Spike

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spike doesn't feel things

The hurt will come later, edging into his awareness like a razorblade.  Thin, sharp, cutting into his dreams and showing him snapshot seconds of green eyes and blood red fingernails.  _This is wrong_ , it whispers.  _This has to end._ But he can’t.  He knows he can’t.  She’s like a drug.  Better than a drug.  Pure endorphin high, every time her scent touches his skin. 

His usually indifferent glance becomes studied care when he notices the scratches later.  He should be angry at the marks because they represent the potential for discovery.  It would only take one accidental glimpse and their secret would be out.  But the angry red weals are the only thing to link those nights with daylight.  

And it’s so different during the day.  Everything is so…normal.  The snippy comments go on unabated; the cutting banter that goads each other into doing their job better, faster.  To all outside appearances, one barely tolerates the other.  Both take pains to keep any subtext out of it.  Business first; pleasure later. 

It’ll end eventually.  It’s not love, after all.  At least that’s what he keeps telling himself, night after night.  It’s not love.  Someone wrote a song about it, a very long time ago:  “It’s just a silly phase I’m going through.”  But night after night, the razors in his brain reach a little further towards the ache in his chest.  They’ll meet somewhere in his throat one of these days, and then what’ll he do?


	3. Faye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Faye feels things, but would prefer not to.

She was surprised at first by how gentle he could be.  Nothing in his actions or demeanor could prepare her for that.  Their first encounter had been sudden, a kiss stolen in between one breath and another.  _That_ was surprising enough in and of itself.  But once that last wall had been torn down and they found themselves tangled up in each other, her instincts proved on point.  He was aching, brutal, and took her breath away with his ferocity.  She lost a little bit of herself every time.

She cared a little less about those bits every time, too. 

But he gave those tiny pieces back, scrap by scrap, in little moments and fragile seconds before leaving for the living room.  They never slept in the same bed, ever.  It was an unspoken law; that one last line that had never been crossed.  But he would put her into her own bed, softly brush a calloused hand across her cheek and kiss her goodnight. 

He’d try not to meet her eyes, but she’d caught him staring once or twice.  His eyes were the most shocking of all, the mismatched brown softening, warming like they never did during the day.  Were they looking at her, or through her?  That was the thought she tried to drown most nights, humming to herself or listening to those old movies he watched until her brain quieted and she fell asleep.

_Not love.  Not love.  Not love.  Please?_   This is her endless mantra, the prayer before sleep.  She can’t afford to give herself away like that.  Her body?  That means nothing.  Not since she learned that it made an effective weapon.  But her heart is a different matter entirely.  It’s all she has left.  But even that is being invaded, cell by cell, by this man she never expected to be gentle.  She wonders what will happen when he’s taken it over entirely.  


End file.
